Latest Comments

sila: whoa!! that sure looks like fun! well done on participating and great job learning! hopefully you can…Hisham: Sure thing, Luke! Hope to see the birthday wish too if it’s possible.Luke: Hi, I would like to use one of ur photo to design a birthday wish for Sitiawan. I would put a credit …Hisham: Let’s just say “Canto Bight” was originally the name of some Tapani Sector noble’s pet duck.Edward: Or the city was named after the planet. Or they were both named after some forgotten dignitary. Weird…sila: glad that opah felt better though. hope she continues to feel healthy.sila: yay to a successful surgery! i hope you are recovering nicely. i’m imagining weird things with the s…Hisham: Thanks, chief. And yes I think your name is the longest we’ve ever had on here. Haha.

About

Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.

Again, use these for any spy games from Top Secret S.I. to Covert Ops. It is highly possible that you could use these even for modern Lovecraftian games with secret agents such as Delta Green or The Laundry.

Irfan's fourteenth birthday came and went. So did Irfan's grandparents from Perak.

It would be easy to say "I can't believe how tall and how far he'd come" but the truth is that I am not surprised. With the opportunities and facilities available to him here - as opposed to the Klang Valley where he would have to fight with the sheer number of students in school for available teaching and learning resources - Irfan is surely and gradually turning into a young man with the powers and abilities of a teenager.

What would be best for us to celebrate a fourteenth birthday? I have no idea, so we decided on going our for pizza!

When the pizza arrived it looked appealing and it was quite delicious. My personal criteria for "delicious" was fulfilled thanks to onions.

One Saturday, our driveway became an apam balik station. Many visitors came to obtain free apam balik as dessert to go with their meal.

The driveway had been converted because of the wedding feast held by our neighbour to commemorate the wedding between his son and daughter-in-law, and his daughter and son-in-law.

A twofer!

The previous day both Ain and I helped out with the preparing of the food. I helped cut up the beef into small pieces while Ain had her fingertips chemically seared off when she attempted to remove the skin out of a million metric tonnes (or so it seemed) of garlic.

Apparently deskinning a large amount of garlic can be painful to your fingers.

There was a meeting some weeks back and we had given them permission to set up the apam balik station here.

Across the street where the food was being served, an ais batu campur station had also been set up. But we are here today to talk about the apam balik station.

Despite this photo, Irfan was not as enthusiastic about consuming the apam balik as Yong and I were and we both enjoyed the little things greatly.

During the feast, our friends from the nearby who were invited to the wedding also visited our house. It was a pleasant day for everyone.

The second Eid of the year has come and gone. For Hari Raya Haji, we took the bus back to Pasir Mas. But for this Aidiladha post, we focus on games played by Irfan, Aiman and Zara when the cousins rendezvous at their grandparents house in Pondok Lubok Tapah.

Irfan could not wait to meet up with Aiman once again...

...although Irfan had some trouble getting the sand out of his eye at mornings.

The first game they played was one Aiman brought: Monopoly. However I don't think they found any monopole ores.

The students are well-behaved (so far) and are very disciplined, most wearing their dark engineering jacket uniforms. They adhere to procedure quite well to, even if registering for classes seemed to be a haphazard affair. They spent little time appointing a class representative among themselves. And the class reps were easy to communicate with via smartphone messaging apps.

I was quite apprehensive of presenting the module to the students, especially in trying to get the lessons delivered relevant to each class's course as each class belonged to a different engineering or business course, and I had to customise the delivery and how I presented examples to each class. And my gamemastering experience also helped, I believe.

Ultimately I discovered that the key to a good lesson presentation is to brush up one's stand up comedy skills.

When you were a child, you always imagined - no, been compelled to believe - that life is a series of consequent acts that scales up as you experience it. You would expect pieces of your future would fall into place like a linear jigsaw puzzle that solves itself as you grow older.

For example if you started out as a young technician perhaps you would advance into becoming an engineer and perhaps end your professional career as a top level manager or even a CEO of an engineering consultant firm. But on the other hand here I am at 43 and my jigsaw puzzle consists of a collection of discarded pieces from a hundred totally different puzzles.

Throughout my four decades (plus change) of life I have been a extremely short-lived manufacturer and seller of bookmarks, a helicopter technician, a translation company executive, an IT company marketer, a freelance writer, a research assistant, a freelance proofreader, a children books' illustrator, an IT executive, a freelance illustrator, an avionics company techincal manager, a graphic designer, a university translator, a comic artist, a photographer and a language instructor.

Two things: Firstly, my professional life is apparently a series of unfortunate, unconnected, unresolved events, much like a number of the RPG campaigns I have run. And secondly, two of the jobs in the list above are a lie as I have never worked in any of these two job titles. Can you guess which?

Instead of having to ride a bike on a remote road in the early hours of the morning only to face off with a entire family of wild boars once upon a time, I am faced with the following view en route to work now:

Instead of driving all over town in the middle of the night to get a piece of tech repaired by an engineer who is only in the country for a single night before I had to fly to another country with the tech, I have to meet these humans now and try to teach them stuff:

I am still insanely vexed at how I have arrived here, teaching these university students English. Will I succeed? Will I instead produce a new generation of twisted thinkers?

We'll find out if they come for me with a straitjacket before the semester is done.